Mark Pilkington's new book Mirage Men is a dizzying ride through a world of deception, manipulation and psychological warfare by intelligence agencies. Working in the field of UFO phenomena, the Mirage Men sow elaborate patterns of disinformation.

Whether you think that UFOs are probably just satellites or shooting stars, or if you think the aliens have already landed, then your beliefs were probably planted by them. As Pilkington discovered, they can be subtle enough to deceive whole populations, or intense enough to literally drive their targets insane.

Looking for a guide through this maze of mirrors I met the author, UFO researcher, and sometime maker of crop circles in a pub off Tottenham Court Road. But could I trust a man who has himself been "outed" as an agent of MI5?

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Wired: You travel across the UFO heartland of the Southwest US in the book; was there ever a UFO deception operation in Britain?

Mark Pilkington: To some extent yes. For example, in the book I tell the story of Milton Torres, an American pilot based at RAF Manston in Kent. In 1957 he was ordered to intercept what appeared to be a huge UFO on his radar; he armed his missiles -- remember this was over the Kent countryside! -- and approached, only to find that there was nothing there. The next day an American claiming to be from the National Security Agency instructed him to keep mum, which he did, for thirty years. The incident sounds like a demonstration of the CIA and NSA's extremely secret Palladium system for spoofing radar signals, which can account for some UFOs picked up on radar.

But my hunch is that if the Americans were doing it, then at some point we would have been doing it too. I did speak to former employee of the RAF Provost and Security Services -- our equivalent to the USAF's AFOSI. He told me that part of his work had involved generating UFO accounts, but didn't want to go on the record for the book. I am hoping to follow that lead a little further, however.

W: During your investigation you came across intelligence officers in Air Force uniform, who were actually from another agency, plain-clothes operatives who seem to be military&hellip; Who's behind it all?

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MP: Yes, it was apparently not uncommon for CIA or NSA Contact Officers to dress as armed services personnel when contacting UFO witnesses, and I expect that it worked the other way around. There's a bizarre internal Air Force memo from March 1967 that describes someone in an Air Force uniform assembling UFO witnesses in a school room and telling them that they didn't see anything, while someone claiming to be from NORAD pinched UFO photos from Rex Heflin in California in 1965.

I also wouldn't be surprised to find that civilian UFO investigators had pretended to be from the military or intelligence agencies in the past. In the 1960s prankster UFO researchers would freak out other ufologists by dressing and behaving like the mysterious Men in Black -- a concept [that became] a key part of UFO lore.

So the short answer is that everyone -- from UFO investigators to alphabet soupers -- has been behind the UFO story at some point or another. That's why it's so difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the facts from the folklore and deception.

W: In the book you get to know Rick Doty, a former Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent who admits to having passed on fake documents to UFO researchers. How influential were these -- and did they really drive someone mad?

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MP: There were two sets of inter-related documents that really inflamed the UFO myth during the 1980s. One was the "Aquarius" memo that hinted at a US government UFO research programme called Aquarius, and mentioned a group called "MJ-Twelve". This was given to Paul Bennewitz, a civilian engineer who worked alongside Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuqerque New Mexico. Bennewitz believed that he was eavesdropping on the communications of ETs flying in and out of the base, these were apparently emissions from an NSA project which he was "decoding" to find alien messages in. After being encouraged in his delusions for some years by Doty and others working out of Kirtland, Bennewitz developed serious paranoid psychosis and had to be institutionalised for a month. During this entire time Bennewitz was quite influential in the UFO field, and many of the ideas he promoted, and was encouraged to believe by AFOSI -- that there's an ET base next to Dulce, New Mexico, that the ETs have traded their technology with the US government -- are still central to the UFO lore. My sense is that Bennewitz was deliberately targetted to distribute nonsense into the UFO community.

W: Doty argues that all the deception is a way of preparing people for the truth when it is revealed, and he seems to believe wholeheartedly in aliens. In fact he claims to have seen an alien being interviewed at an Air Force base. Did he really see something?

MP: Well that's the $50 billion question! Is Doty telling porkies? Was he really shown something, or does he really believe that he's been shown something? Any of these eventualities are possible and that's what makes Doty, and his story, so fascinating. Perhaps in testing or training its intelligence officers the Air Force at one point presented them with bizarre material, maybe to assess their responses to unknown factors, or even to test their ability to keep secrets. If they feed them UFO material, then if they do blab nobody gets hurt. All I can say for sure is that Rick isn't crazy, and he has an incredible ability to generate UFO stories, seemingly spontaneously.

W: Doty insisted that he was acting as a "private citizen" when you met him at a UFO conference. Was there anything that made you think Doty still has some clout in military circles?

MP: At the time we were talking to Doty he worked with the New Mexico Department of Public Safety and I presume that he still does. I don't know what kind of relationship he now has with the military, but he was able to take my colleague John Lundberg and I on a brief tour of Kirtland AFB, which was fascinating. Doty showed a card to the guard at the gate, who saluted without asking Rick who his two shifty-looking passengers were. I have to say we were impressed -- there aren't many former employers who would let me in if I just showed up with two random people!

W: You seem to have uncovered a two-track approach to UFO deception. On the one hand intelligence agencies want to explain them away as meteors or satellites, but they're also faking material about alien contacts. How does that work?

MP: This does seem to be the case, and also seems to go back to the earliest days of the UFO story -- for example the April 1952 LIFE magazine article, written in conjunction with Air Force personnel, that promote the idea that flying saucers were from outer space, while at the same time their men on the ground were telling UFO witnesses that they hadn't seen anything. It appears paradoxical, but it does make some sense.

There appear to be two stages in their UFO defences. The first is generally encouraging the idea that UFOs aren't worth talking about, which is the attitude of the majority of the population and keeps them away from the subject (until they have a sighting of their own!). The second stage is for the small few who are incurably interested and actively involved in the subject; they are going to believe that Earth is being visited by extraterrestrials no matter what you tell them, so you use them to keep the UFO story alive, because a) it feeds back into discouraging other people from getting involved and b) it's a useful cover for all manner of covert operations.

W: Your book shows how releasing a few documents to the right people can influence a whole community. Now every new movie seems to have its own viral marketing campaign complete with fake videos and bogus websites -- have the Mirage Men's influencing techniques have gone mainstream?

MP: Absolutely, the techniques are more or less identical. And it's no coincidence that some of the key players in the information wars came out of advertising and the media. Sefton Delmer, who turned deception into an artform for the British in WWII, was a former Daily Express journalist, while Edward Lansdale, one of the great American Cold Warriors who coined the phrase "hearts and minds", worked in the advertising industry.

Coincidentally or not I worked for a few years as an advertising copywriter. One of my last freelance jobs was writing a PowerPoint presentation for QinetiQ, something I wasn't told I'd be doing and wasn't too happy about at the time.

W: What do you make of the recent UFO sightings over Iran? (The Iranian authorities even claim to have shot one down last year). The unidentified objects are described as glowing or having lights on them, do this rule out secret US spy drones?

MP: There was a UFO wave over Iran in 2004 when I first began researching Mirage Men -- many of them, not surprisingly, seen over their burgeoning nuclear facilities. The Iranian Air Force announced that they'd be having a UFO conference to investigate the sightings, but I never heard any more about that. It's interesting to see how in Iran, just as in the UK or the US, initial reports of lights in the sky will quite quickly transform into more dramatic stories -- the second wave of sightings in 2004 involved strange robot creatures with claw arms hovering in the skies. This kind of escalation is a natural part of the folkloric narrative process, though it's also possible that these stories were faked by witnesses or journalists to sell newspapers, or were even planted by Iran's enemies to stir up unease.

Bright lights don't necessarily rule out spy planes or drones, maybe they were there to distract attention from another covert operation. Or perhaps the purpose was to generate unease and fear amongst the population with the eventual goal of destabilising the regime. The US planned to fly "ghost planes" over Libya in 1986 for similar reasons, though the project was never carried out.

W: British hacker Gary McKinnon claims to have found details of a secret US space fleet on Pentagon computers -- do you think he's telling the truth?

MP: I actually think he probably is telling the truth, though not for the reasons he thinks. By his own account McKinnon was a rubbish hacker using off the peg software he'd found on the Internet, so it's highly unlikely that he'd have got very far into the Pentagon's networks.

I suspect that they keep UFO files and other sensational material strung around their outer defences as honey traps to lure in people like McKinnon, then while they're feasting on the alien goodness, they identify them and eventually pounce. The material that McKinnon claims to have found -- about a Space Navy and antigravity craft -- are effectively the same stories that Steven Greer, a former paramedic turned ET prophet, has been promoting for years anyway. Perhaps this is the same material that's been fed to Greer, or perhaps the Pentagon's techies just adapted the material from his web sites and got their bait for free!

There's an almost identical story from 1996, though it had a happier ending. Matthew Bevan, a 21-year-old computer hacker and UFO enthusiast from Cardiff, found documentation about anti-gravity drives while scouring Wright Patterson AFB's computer network for information about the Roswell incident. Like McKinnon he was arrested and the US sought to extradite him, but failed. Interestingly an AFOSI officer at the trial stated that Bevan wasn't trying to do any harm and was only looking for UFOs, which suggests that they don't take the subject too seriously! Bevan, who was a good hacker, is now a freelance security consultant.

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W: By the end of the book, Doty is accusing you of working for British Intelligence, and UFO researcher Richard Hall says that you "are on the MI5 payroll." Is this true, and what's the pay like in the Security Services these days?

MP: I don't know if someone made the accusation to Doty, or if he was just testing me out, but the story spread like wildfire, which might serve a possible purpose of course -- to discourage other mirage men from talking to me and generate suspicions about me in the US UFO community. It's all very flattering, but I don't think I'd get very far as a real spy!

Being pegged as an agent for the forces of darkness is something of an inevitability and a badge of honour when you research these areas. It's part of the narcissism involved in conspiracy thinking -- their research is so important that "they" must be planting their agents amongst us. The irony of course is that intelligence agents probably do sometimes go to UFO conferences, to research new ideas, and to find out if anyone's accidentally seeing anything they shouldn't. But I'm not one of them!